Bits of history: Lost & Found Film series a success, thanks to readers, colleagues

That UW scientists once sprayed young salmon with fluorescent dye particles to track them as they made their way from a creek to a larger body of water.

That researchers from the Psychology Department once undertook an experiment on trash at Woodland Park Zoo.

That an obstetrician and professor at the University made instructional films, but also once did photography for a short film of the Opening Day Regatta.

That’s just a little bit of what Film Archivist Hannah Palin has learned from the Lost & Found Film Series on University Week over the last year. Lost & Found Films are “orphan films” from the UW Libraries collection — films that were made between the late 1940s and the early 1970s and have some connection to the University, but no one really knows why they were made or how they were used. So, Palin figured, why not put them out there and see what she could find out? She supplied the film clips and what little information the libraries’ had about them, and University Week staff posted them to our site.

The results have been gratifying. Consider those salmon, for example. Palin had long joked about the film in which fish appeared to be spray painted green. She knew that some scientific experiment must be going on, but didn’t know what it might be. When the film, Big Beef Creek, showed up on UWeek, she got explanatory information from Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

Readers also identified the location of the trash experiment, though not its purpose. And as for the obstetrician, he’s Charles Stipp and he was identified as a photographer in the Opening Day Regatta film.

When the film appeared, Stipp called Palin. “He told me he’d made hundreds of instructional films,” Palin said “He said the regatta film was just a sideline. When funding starts flowing again I want to go and search for his films to see if we can bring them to the forefront. If there’s a Charles Stipp collection, we need to get it out there.”

Stipp isn’t the only one who went beyond our comments field and called Palin. Art Professor Edward Praczukowski, who was featured in one of the films talking about his art, also talked to her.

“We had a really nice conversation and I found out that he’s retired but is still painting, and also that he had worked with another professor at the time — Bill Ritchie — who is into video art and printmaking. So I had conversations with Bill as well,” Palin said. “Then I went down to our storage area in Special Collections and was looking at this range of videotapes that I really hadn’t had time to look at and I realized that there was all of Bill Ritchie’s work.

“There was this film that they both had worked on that they considered lost, although Bill had a copy in a format that’s really hard to access. We had it, so I was able to make a copy of ours and give it to them and also put it up online in the libraries’ Digital Media Collection.”

That’s where all the information Palin gathers will eventually go. What that means is that library patrons will be able to call up each film online, view a clip and read the information the libraries have about it.

Which, in the end, is what it’s all about for Palin. “These films and videotapes contain American history and regional history and local history in a way that’s so different from a piece of paper or a photograph,” she said. “It’s part of the way that, in the last century, we’ve started to tell our story. And it’s just as vital and just as important as any other documentation of our history.”

The UWeek project has been so helpful to Palin’s efforts that she presented it to a regional gathering of archivists to show them a new way to “engage the community in film collections.” And she hopes to show the films to other groups, such as UW alumni. She already plans to include some of them in the annual Home Movie Day, slated for Oct. 16.

All the films in the UWeek series are still available online, and Palin welcomes further information about any of them: